Value of Industry Specific CRM (CFFL 438)
Value of Industry Specific CRM (CFFL 438)
Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about the value of an industry specific CRM. What does CRM stand for? You’re like the sales person of the world. You’re the single best sales person I’ve ever met in my life.
Jill DeWit: Oh my goodness. I can’t remember. It’s like customer
Jack Butala: Customer something
Jill DeWit: Management
Jack Butala: Customer relationship management.
Jill DeWit: That’s it. Thank you. I’m like what.
Jack Butala: Customer relations manager or something. It’s a database-
Jill DeWit: That’s hilarious.
Jack Butala: For your customers. Well, before we get too far into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free.
Jill DeWit: Alright, so-
Jack Butala: I love this question, by the way.
Jill DeWit: I do too. So I have the question from Claire and then I have a couple different responses that were already in our online community, and I wanted to share those and then we can talk about it. Alright, so Claire asked, “Hi all. Wondering where you go for past sales data. I’m working in a smaller county east of the Mississippi and comps are harder. What sources am I missing? I’ve checked eBay, LandWatch, Land and Farm, as well as current for sale data. I know Jack and Jill used to have a spreadsheet where you could go and see hundreds of their past sales, but I can’t remember if I got it from an older version of their website or if I came in the package. Any ideas appreciated. Thanks, Claire.” So here’s a few people that weighed in on this. Trevor replied, “Hey, call several brokers or realtors in the area. Tell them you’re buying in the area and you would love to get a list of sold properties in 2016 with raw vacant land.”
Jack Butala: Nice work Trevor.
Jill DeWit: “It might take you a few tries, but you will have addresses and sold prices that you can then start to superimpose on your index map of the county.” Brilliant.
Jack Butala: God, Trevor. Nice.
Jill DeWit: “I would also ask the brokers about hot areas and why they are desirable. I really like getting that list of sold comps and then hammering down by subdivision on your RealQuest searches, then using the actual sold comps by subdivision. It’s even more, it is even much more specific if the county has a good GIS and then you can use your subdivision search results and transpose those on your index map.” He’s getting into it, man. “Many of these huge subdivisions will also have higher priced areas compared to other spots. Just depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go.”
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: I love it. And then one more little note. Michael added, “Hey if you use RealQuest, which not all the parcels have sales data, but some do.”
Jack Butala: That’s right.
Jill DeWit: “Pull from RealQuest where the last market sales date is within the last 12-18 months.”
Jack Butala: Yes. He’s right.
Jill DeWit: These are all brilliant, brilliant, brilliant responses.
Jack Butala: So there’s a, there’s two real places you can get completed sales data. One is the MLS, and you’re at the mercy of the real estate agent going in there after the property is sold and closing the thing out and putting a sale price in there. And you’re at the mercy of whether or not it’s correct, the sale price is correct. Or the assessor, which is the right place.
Jill DeWit: Yup.
Jack Butala: You know the assessor has a vested interest in recording the sales price because that’s how they base the assessed value, which is how they tax the property. Property taxes. So you can also call the assessor, but like Michael added at the end here, if the county’s pretty diligent about it, it’ll be right in your RealQuest data. So you have a lot more sales comparison data than you really think. Right at your … Just because you’re at a silver level member, you have RealQuest.
The whole thing is what Trevor says. What’s important about this is how you use it. If you have, if you’re serious about this business, please start thinking in terms of spatial index map for everything you do. Think of the county as a map on the wall and then spatially see where the boundaries of each APN scheme start and stop.
We’re working on a product that … Well, it ends up we don’t have to actually complete it ourselves. We’re just going to get a group subscription for everybody. There’s a product out there called Podia. I think it’s, I just spoke with the sales rep and they have the completed sales, the MLS portion of the completed sales for every single county in the country through an IDX feed. Here’s the kicker. It’s only for houses and commercial property. It’s not for land, but they are expanding that sometime this year and the minute that happens, we will make it available to our members. That’ll take all mystery out of this forever. So sit tight. The internet is growing up with us.
Jill DeWit: Love it.
Jack Butala: Do you have a question or you want to be on the show? Reach out to either one of us on landinvestors.com. Today’s topic, the value of an industry specific CRM. So here’s what Jill and I were talking before the show. Here’s what’s different about real estate investing over all the other e-commerce or commerce efforts out there.
Let’s use Zappos, the shoe sales company, as an example. So Zappos does a bang-up job of selling shoes. They’ve like really kind of revolutionized the industry. But here’s what’s different. There are two sides, this is a take away from the whole show, there are two sides to every real estate transaction. There’s only one side to an e-commerce transaction. They set up relationships with suppliers. Let’s say 10, 15, 20, 30 suppliers all over the world, and that’s how they get their shoes in. And it’s once it’s done it’s done. And then they just focus on sales. Sales, sales, sales. Ours is two ends of, there’s two ends to it. There’s the acquisition and the sale. So you have to have a really super beefy CRM that’s real specific. You know, you’re a CRM expert, Jill. How many CRM’s have you used in your career?
Jill DeWit: Oh my gosh …
Jack Butala: Starting with American Airlines.
Jill DeWit: American Airlines. 10.
Jack Butala: I mean, have you ever worked on one that just sucks?
Jill DeWit: Oh gosh, yes. All the time. Yeah. So, absolutely. I’ve worked on probably 10. That’s a pretty good number, including ours. And now recreating our own.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: You know, as we’re doing that. So I’ve worked on a lot.
Jack Butala: We’re having one … Right now in our land investing company we have a CRM that I paid about a quarter of a million dollars to custom develop in 2004. So it’s real clunky, and my original plan was to just share it with everybody, give everybody a bunch of user names, but it’s so clunky and awful that we’re redesigning it in Zoho to make it perfectly custom. So I mean, follow me on the anatomy of a line of data from start to finish. So, you go into RealQuest and you download all the people who own property that you want to send an offer to. And I’m not, it’s beyond the scope of this but, let’s say you download 3000 records. You take those actual records and upload them into your CRM and that gets, that ticks off, that starts the clock. So now you have 3000, let’s call them leads.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: They’re sales leads. I don’t like that word, but everybody knows what it is, so I’ll use it. And so you send out a bunch of offers to these, send out an offer to 3000 people.
Jill DeWit: The sellers.
Jack Butala: The sellers. That’s right.
Jill DeWit: I’m keeping it even simpler. There’s sellers and there’s buyers. These are the sellers.
Jack Butala: Perfect. Perfect.
Jill DeWit: So …
Jack Butala: And then so they get a letter. Some of them rip it up. Some of them call you back and say a real bad, call you nasty names. And some of them sign it and send it back. Or they call you and say heck yeah, I want to sell my property. Thank you for coming along. I would like $4000 for my $19,000 property today.
Jill DeWit: And I have six more.
Jack Butala: So that one made the cut, and I have six more. That one made the cut, so now it gets moved forward throughout the whole, you know, you’ve got to find a notary or you find a title company to close the property. And you move it through the system until it’s posted on the internet. It’s for sale, you know, you buy it. You post it on the internet and then you sell it to somebody obviously and it gets recorded. So those are all events that are kicked off by you know, some make it and some don’t.
So we’re oversimplifying for the purposes of the show, but it’s a lot of events. And it’s a lot of stuff that can happen and you know, you have to have a real intelligence. But, let’s say, Jill just brought up a great point. If somebody’s got six properties you know, you want to make this easy on yourself. Like the show yesterday, you don’t want to even be thinking about posting property or dealing with you know any more of the backend, back office stuff than you need to. And that’s what an industry specific CRM does. So I don’t think anybody’s more qualified than us. And I’m working with the developers to customize it. Any more qualified cause … I’d like to think we’ve seen it all. And once we’ve done it and test it and we transfer our data over, we’ll make it available to our membership, our membership group, for sure.
Jill DeWit: And you can’t just take, I mean we’ve … Some people do. We have some people that are winging it, if you will, with spreadsheets and trying to create their own thing. And that’s a lot of work. It’s much, much easier and you’ll find the value in it quickly when you have a product that’s really designed for you. And I don’t know of anyone anywhere out there that you can get a product like this.
Jack Butala: Me either.
Jill DeWit: That’s designed for us.
Jack Butala: It doesn’t exist. I’ve tried.
Jill DeWit: Even for real estate agents. I don’t, there’s not-
Jack Butala: There’s a couple good ones for real estate agents.
Jill DeWit: But, is it, you know, can you name, can you even name one?
Jack Butala: Podio.
Jill DeWit: Is it really that good for real estate agents?
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: For real estate agents? I don’t think it’s designed for real estate agents. I know people that have made them work. This is what I’m trying to say. I know what you’re talking about.
Jack Butala: I think that like whoever you’re with, like if you’re a Coldwell Banker real estate agent, they have some stuff for you that’s pretty attractive.
Jill DeWit: Maybe unique that they’ve created. Exactly. So, but I guess the whole big picture is, you’ll quickly once you start doing some deals and really get into the business, you’ll find that your clunky old spreadsheet is going to be harder to work with and keep track of, and like you said, move things through the system.
Jack Butala: Yeah, exactly, so … I’ve seen a lot of people make this mistake. What you want a CRM to do is when you get up in the morning and you sit down and turn it on, it tells you what to do.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: Because it’s all triggered by these events. So it might say, oh, it’s time to send out another mailer. Or oh, these 14 deals are …
Jill DeWit: Ready to be posted.
Jack Butala: Or ready to be recorded or whatever. You only have to do six and so. And then once you hit that point, now you got to find somebody else to do all these tasks and now you can just watch them do it in there. So it’s not like … Here’s what you never want to do. Email back and forth, okay thanks Jack, I got it done. Thanks Jill, I did … They don’t want to share documents in email. You want everybody to log into a system that’s working for you. Not your employees. Maybe their virtual assistants or [inaudible 00:11:13] life people. You want them to log in, do their work, and log out without contacting you. And because then you can get a lot more done.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: The old school way is just you get emailed to death.
Jill DeWit: And it’s just a waste of time.
Jack Butala: That’s why I feel like I’m qualified to help these developers kick out a perfect product for us. And it’s going really well. It’s actually a lot of fun. There’s a bunch of stuff that our old clunky quarter of a million dollar system just can’t handle.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: It’s not, for instance, it’s not made for houses at all. And we are making it. You know Jill and I wholesale a lot of houses. We don’t talk about it that much. That’s what 2018 is for. But it’s fun and it’s really profitable.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: And we never go see the property and I don’t own any tools. It’s really cool.
Jill DeWit: Love it.
Jack Butala: Anything else?
Jill DeWit: No.
Jack Butala: Join us in another episode where Jack and Jill discuss how to use information, that’s me.
Jill DeWit: And inspiration, that’s me.
Jack Butala: On just about anything that you want.
Jill DeWit: We use it everyday to buy property for half of what it’s worth and sell it immediately.
Jack Butala: You’re not alone in your real estate ambition. What’s the one that you’ve used that’s like … Is Salesforce any good?
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: It is?
Jill DeWit: Yeah, but only, it’s only for, you know what, but not for this purposes.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: You know, for helping land investors and our people and that kind of thing, it works great. But not for property management, and I can’t put properties in there and it’s not for that at all.
Jack Butala: What did you use in American Airlines in the beginning, like in the DOS days?
Jill DeWit: Oh my gosh, it was called Sabor.
Jack Butala: Oh yeah, we talked about this.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, and it was all backend stuff and that’s, I mean the only customers that you would manage were, you know, the advantage members with their frequent flyer numbers. I know and Sabor evolved to QuickRes which I don’t even know what it is now. So, but it was, it’s … I feel like I’ve said, and then all of the other ones have been like company specific.
Jack Butala: Yeah, yeah, and those are the ones that I’ve used too.
Jill DeWit: That they, you know …
Jack Butala: I started on ACT, ACT! It’s still around. I, you know, when I was a commercial real estate broker in the early 90’s, that’s what I used, and it had a faxing component which was the original way to submit offers, which you can’t do now because of the law, but it was worthwhile.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: I loved it.
Jill DeWit: Cool.
Jack Butala: CRM’s are make or break what you’re doing.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Jack Butala: Information inspiration to buy undervalued property.
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